Resolution 5 – That Bit About Avoiding Facebook

5 I will refuse to look at Facebook between the hours of 9:00 am and 6:00 pm.

I hate Facebook. HATE IT. I quit it once, a few years ago, and happily went about my life never once missing it. Once you’ve been on it for a few weeks and caught up with all the old classmates you lost touch with, reminded as to why you lost touch, there really isn’t much value in Facebook. It’s one gigantic time consuming vortex of uselessness. It’ll suck away hours of your life with greater fortitude than reversing the wind tunnel at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Even now that I’m back on I still refuse to play any games. One trip through the Scrabble wormhole is enough for a lifetime. Oh, and let’s not forget the enlightenment Facebook provides, revealing which of your friends and family are stupid, paranoid, racist, or all three. This can be handy, I suppose, but it’s often just alarming. Life was a lot easier when everyone’s dark secrets were exactly that; secret.

I honestly had no intention of rejoining Facebook but when I started my blog, I felt obliged to restart my Facebook account to help promote my blog. This was back when I foolishly believed blogging could be a money making venture for me. I also figured that, either through naïveté or vanity, everyone I ever knew would be keen to read my blog, what with me being so witty and insightful. They’d all share my hilarious posts with their friends who’d go on to share with their friends and so on and so forth like a vintage shampoo commercial. Pretty soon there’d be a continual stream of new fans flocking to my upstart online media empire and they needed a place to gather. Facebook, I’d been led to believe, was just the place to facilitate all of this. Yeah, I’m kind of an idiot too.

Some of this did actually happen, in a far too small sample size to be statistically valid sense, and when weighted against the horrors that Facebook exposes me to, hardly worth the effort or pain. Not to mention that my fragile willpower was once again but wet skin on the muddy slope back down into the rabbit hole resulting, this past year, in Facebook consuming far too much of my time. I desperately need to dial my Facebook second-coming back down a notch. Or fifty.

So this year I will force myself not to open Facebook between the hours of 9:00am and 6:00pm. Pfft. That’s not even much of test when you think about it. Ideally I’d quit Facebook all together, now that would be a resolution. But in light of resolution 1, were I to actually become a working, dare I risk jinxing it, published author then having an online presence will actually be important. In that light, rose coloured though it may be, I don’t want to abandon Facebook completely. This timeframe will allow me to catch up while eating breakfast in the morning before focusing on a productive day. After supper has been eaten and cleaned up, I can see what’s happened while I was away. Easy peasy. I will cut down on my time wasting and distraction during the day, not to mention relieve myself of some of the stress that comes from the various obnoxious, stupid, and vapid posts that often litter my feed. Besides, I’ll still have Twitter for that!